PolishLinux has an interview with the KPackageKit developers. PackageKit is a abstraction layer over the different Linux package management tools. It is primarily designed to unify the graphical tools and provide a consistent distribution neutral framework for application developers to install add-ons as well. This project was initiated and continues to be maintained by Red Hat developer Richard Hughes who also wrote the initial GNOME frontend to it, called gpk-application. Multiple backends currently exist and it is the default for Fedora and Foresight Linux already. Other distributions including Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Mandriva, and Gentoo are actively participating in the development of different backends. A KDE interface has been under rapid development recently and just did a 1.0 release last week. This interview provides more details.

That's exactly the point. I have 78 binaries that use GTK. If I were on a a system with OSX packaging, I would have 78 instances of GTK compiled into the various apps I use that require GTK. As it is, Linux uses shared libs so I have exactly 1.

It would also mean a possibility of multiple versions of GTK being installed, depending on what version the particular app was built against. It would be a nightmare to try to keep up security updates on a system like that.

Then there is the problem of a particular library getting loaded multiple times for every app that uses it. If it's statically compiled or dynamically yet shipped with the binary, then I have firefox loading it's copy of GTK and Sylpheed loading it copy and so on. Freaking insanity. It wouldn't take long for people to get real tired of 10GB Linux installs that need 8GB of RAM to run.